The civil organization Sport for Peace, Education, Empowerment and Development (SPEED) was established as a national Non-Governmental Organization via an act of parliament by a dedicated team of young men and women who had recognized and noted the fact that there was no single agency at the time of its inception that was capable of addressing the many opportunities to leverage sports for peace and development (SDP) nor the capabilities or networking potential to address the grassroots gaps in engineering the enabling environment for sports performance development (SPD).

In formulating the idea for SPEED, most crucially, this team recognized that civil agency has the greatest potency to a) engage for outreach b) engage for policy coherence c) create the most conducive enabling environment for triggering a groundswell for performance excellent d) obtain the assistance of multiple local and international experts to support such an initiative and e) create the infrastructure, impact strategies and process system required for development of sport, sports research and SDP.

The Operational Objectives of SPEED:

Sri Lanka society primarily and other nations secondarily shall have the opportunity to use the third space neutrality of sport to create integrated, commonly purposed societies.

Sri Lanka society primarily and other nations secondarily shall have the opportunity to use the potency of sport towards personal and collective social, economic and cultural development.

Sri Lankan athletes primarily and those of other nations secondarily shall have the opportunity to be identified exclusively on the basis of ability and merit and afforded the opportunity to further the development of their sport and education potential.

Sri Lanka athletes primarily and those of other nations secondarily shall be afforded the opportunity to engage in sport as a career that envelops and develops throughout their life from pre-competition through competition to post-competition eras within an enabling environment with strong, coherent, consistent policy, sound infrastructure and quality human resources for scientific optimization of sport performance.